KAREN WILKIN
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confronting walls, the history of Cubism, and much more. The image,
Motherwell tells us, came from studio happenstance - seeing a small can–
vas leaning against a larger one - but the image proved seminal. As he
described it, he realized that "it was a picture in itself, a lovely painted
surface plane, beautifully, if minimally,
divided, which
is
what drawing is ."
And drawing, of course, is what Motherwell was really about. One
of the master draughtsmen of our century, he invented an eloquent per–
sonal calligraphy - both fluid diagrams of intense emotional states and
testimony to a faultless sense of placement - wordless flourishes,
sometimes engulfed by cascading curtains of paint, sometimes floating
free . Sensitive as he was to nuances of surface, it may be that his greatest
gift was for line. I have written before about my conviction that
drawing was primary to Motherwell's work. Color, by his own
description, was not a means of structuring a picture, but rather a way of
carrying content. "Generally, I use few colors," Motherwell said,
"yellow ochre, vermillion, orange, cadmium green, ultramarine blue.
Mainly I use each color as simply symbolic: ochre for the earth, green for
the grass, blue for the sky and sea. I guess that black and white, which I
use most often, tend to be protagonists."
In the collages that Motherwell produced throughout his career,
the drawing impulse is translated into edges and, sometimes, into ready
made patterns and words. These spare, accomplished pictures are vivid
evidence, too, of his life-long Francophilia and delight in anything
Mediterranean. They make plain the basis of his art in French modernism,
his enthusiasm for French poetry, food, even for the color of French
cigarette wrappers. In some ways, the collages offer the clearest image of
Motherwell's personality, although, as it turns out, it may not be quite
accurate. If we search beyond the evident excellences of structure, the
tense accord of disparate parts, and try to read the materials that make up
the collage for clues to Motherwell's life, we are liable to be misled.
"Most of the papers I use in my collages are random," he said.
"Even the sheet music. In fact, I don't read music. I look at printed mu–
sic as calligraphy, as beautiful details. I do not smoke Gauloises cigarettes,
but that particular blue of the label happens to attract me, so I possess
it." Still, he didn't deny that the collages had layers of meaning, at least
for him, beyond immediate appearance. "The collages are a kind of pri–
vate diary, not made with an actual autobiographical intention, but one
that functions in an associative way for me ... For a painter as abstract
as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday
world into pictures. Some of my collages make past years and place in all
their concreteness arise in my mind."
Motherwell's images have stamped themselves on our consciousness,
but he has left us a second inheritance, as well. In recent years, as a sur-
